5.29.2007


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5.28.2007


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5.21.2007

From Oscar

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5.19.2007

Today is a sad, sad day. I've just learned of the death of jc from jc's designs (she's listed under my kewl blogs over on the right). Many of you have seen and commented on her designs since I've posted several of them here. I met her through the blogsphere on Howard Dean's former blog about four years ago and felt she was like a *sister* to me ever since.

♥ ♥ ♥ Rest in peace, my dear jc.♥ ♥ ♥

Here is her last design post on March 30, 2007...

Elephants Never Forget?


Available here.

Posted by jc at 3/30/2007 11:05:00 AM 0 comments

Labels: Democratic majority, hearings, investigations, Republicans
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5.16.2007

What are you paying for gas!?!

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5.14.2007


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5.13.2007

History of Mother's Day

Julia Ward Howe's accomplishments did not end with the writing of her famous poem, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." As Julia became more famous, she was asked to speak publicly more often. Her husband became less adamant that she remain a private person, and while he never actively supported her further efforts, his resistance eased.

She saw some of the worst effects of the war -- not only the death and disease, which killed and maimed the soldiers. She worked with the widows and orphans of soldiers on both sides of the war, and realized that the effects of the war go beyond the killing of soldiers in battle. She also saw the economic devastation of the Civil War, the economic crises that followed the war, the restructuring of the economies of both North and South.

In 1870, Julia Ward Howe took on a new issue and a new cause. Distressed by her experience of the realities of war, determined that peace was one of the two most important causes of the world (the other being equality in its many forms) and seeing war arise again in the world in the Franco-Prussian War, she called in 1870 for women to rise up and oppose war in all its forms. She wanted women to come together across national lines, to recognize what we hold in common above what divides us, and commit to finding peaceful resolutions to conflicts. She issued a Declaration, hoping to gather together women in a congress of action.

She failed in her attempt to get formal recognition of a Mother's Day for Peace. Her idea was influenced by Anna Jarvis, a young Appalachian homemaker who had attempted starting in 1858 to improve sanitation through what she called Mothers' WorkDays. She organized women throughout the Civil War to work for better sanitary conditions for both sides, and in 1868 she began work to reconcile Union and Confederate neighbors.

Anna Jarvis' daughter, also named Anna Jarvis, would of course have known of her mother's work, and the work of Julia Ward Howe. Much later, when her mother died, this second Anna Jarvis started her own crusade to found a memorial day for women. The first such Mother's Day was celebrated in West Virginia in 1907 in the church where the elder Anna Jarvis had taught Sunday School. And from there the custom caught on — spreading eventually to 45 states. Finally the holiday was declared officially by states beginning in 1912, and in 1914 the President, Woodrow Wilson, declared the first national Mother's Day.
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5.09.2007

YOU GO GUYS!

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5.06.2007

BUSH GETS LIFE

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5.02.2007

'Joan Baez banned from Army center'

WASHINGTON - Folk singer and anti-war activist Joan Baez says she doesn’t know why she was not allowed to
perform for recovering soldiers recently at Walter Reed Army Medical Center as she planned.


In a letter to The Washington Post published Wednesday, she said rocker John Mellencamp had asked her to perform with him last Friday and that she accepted his invitation.

“I have always been an advocate for nonviolence and I have stood as firmly against the Iraq war as I did the Vietnam War 40 years ago,” she wrote. “I realize now that I might have contributed to a better welcome home for those soldiers fresh from Vietnam. Maybe that’s why I didn’t hesitate to accept the invitation to sing for those returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. In the end, four days before the concert, I was not ‘approved’ by the Army to take part. Strange irony.”
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5.01.2007



Kudos to puddle
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